


I Need A Sure Thing

by Eternaladdict



Category: Skins (UK)
Genre: F/M, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-26
Updated: 2013-02-26
Packaged: 2017-12-03 17:41:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 10,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/700930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eternaladdict/pseuds/Eternaladdict
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'This is the way it’s always been; Tony and Effy, two halves of some greater sibling whole.  A beautiful, indivisible clique of two that has no room for parents who could never understand what it is to be something brilliant and dark and strange.'</p>
<p>Tony, Effy and the inevitable.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Tony

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not really sure where this story fits in with cannon as it was written pre season 4 but please bear with me and hopefully it will make some sense!

* * *

_When Effy arrives home the first thing she does is call her brother. ‘I’m in love’ she tells him when he answers._

_He can’t think of a reply, settles for coming home instead._

\---

The club’s dark and crowded, the way Tony likes it.

For months after the accident (when he’d been fresh out of the hospital and finally able to talk, walk, eat, act like a relatively normal person again) this club would have terrified him.

The noise, the crowds, it would have felt like a reminder of everything he’d lost. Everything he’d never be again. But he isn’t afraid anymore. The music is loud and Tony stands there for a minute, vibrations echoing in his chest like a heartbeat, like blood pumping in his veins screaming alive, alive, alive with each fresh beat.

It’s hot inside; sweat condenses and drips from the roof. The floor’s sticky where he stands. He hasn’t been here before but it doesn’t matter. He is himself again and he is certain.

\---

It doesn’t take him long to spot her. Tony’s always been good at spotting Effy in a crowd and tonight there’s the deep blue of her dress to help him.  The abused satin catches the light of the strobes, beckons him like a flare.

Tony came here alone and he lets his eyes linger on his sister for a minute. On the long line of her legs. On the artful rips of her dress and the pale skin that shows through in sudden flashes as she moves.

There’s a bottle of something in her right hand, fingers curled loosely around the neck and Tony wonders if she’s drunk yet. Wonders if later, when they’re alone, he’ll be able to taste the alcohol on her breath.

The boy standing next to her is tall and good looking in his grimy grey tee-shirt and cardigan. Arm looped casually around her shoulder he threads long fingers through her hair.

This boy must be Freddie.

He briefly imagines walking forward, fist raised, imagines the slickness of blood spatter on his face and the wet heat of Effy’s tongue when later, in some darker place, she licked him clean.

But thoughtless violence has never been Tony's style. He prefers something colder, something longer lasting.

\---

After a long time he’s eyes slide to the girl standing opposite Freddie and Effy.  With them yet detached, as if she’s hoping for someone else, someone better.

The girl leans knowingly against the bar, haughtily aware of herself as pretty girls often are, her short pink dress only getting shorter as it rides up against the wood.

‘Karen’ Tony thinks and puts a face to the name.

Karen, the generic picture of a hot girl, the reason Tony’s here tonight, standing sober in this shitty Bristol club while some indie idiot gropes his sister like he owns her, instead of London for the weekend, getting fucked with Anwar and Maxxie liked he’d planned.

Plans that were made before the phone call. Before Effy told him something he’d been so utterly, stupidly confident he’d never hear her say and now he can’t go back, can’t get those words out of his head (I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love) and surely that’s not something he can just be expected to sit back and take.

He doesn’t share his sister’s love, he won’t. Not with some jumped up emo skaterboy with more hair than brains.

So instead of going to London, he came home, came here, head full of plans to make Effy see sense.  And the girl standing opposite her is the key to them all.

A guy stands close, eyes Karen hopefully as he waits to order his drink but Tony can see the disdain in the downward slope of her eyebrows, the critical lines between her eyes.

Karen: the sister, the mark. Tony heads towards her.


	2. Effy

Effy tries hard not to react when she sees him.

But even with the heavy weight of Freddie’s arm around her shoulder, she can’t help the jolt in the pit of her stomach, the increase in her heart rate when she first recognises the outline of her brother’s face in the crowded club. So familiar to her and so loved.

She’s pleased of course, more pleased than she knows she should be with her boyfriend (whom she loves, she really does) standing next to her.

She’d been aware his term finished last week but they hadn’t spoken since she called him to tell him about Freddie and he’d not mentioned anything then about coming home. She thought he’d said something about going to London to visit Maxxie but instead he’s here, in Bristol, in this club, with her.

He’s moving quickly and there’s no real time to be surprised before he’s there, standing opposite them and her confusion is easily swept away with the sheer happiness at his presence.

\---

Introductions are a little difficult, voices failing to carry over the heavy thrum of the music but eventually, after the third time she mouths the word ‘BROTHER’ and waves her hand in the direction of Tony Freddie catches on and then he’s all wide, enthusiastic smiles, hand held out to be shaken, so eager to please at meeting the first family member Effy speaks of with anything close to affection.

And then they’re left standing there, shifting their weight from one foot to another and things are spiraling so quickly into awkward.

It’s too loud to talk and Effy has nothing to say anyway. All she really wants to do is throw her arms around her brother and kiss him until they’ve both forgotten that he’d ever left, until they’ve forgotten that either of them have ever been anywhere but right here, wrapped so tightly around each other nothing (not uni or car crashes or running to random seaside towns) could ever separate them.

She doesn’t do that of course.

As well as things have been going with Freddie since she’d once and truly chosen him over Cook she thinks openly jumping her brother in the middle of a crowded club with her boyfriend and her boyfriend’s sister not three feet away might end up putting a slight strain on the relationship. And she wouldn’t do that anymore, even if they were alone.

This thing with Tony and her is over. She’d made up her mind about that the first time she watched him walk out of the door for Cardiff, and then again when her home life came crumbling down around her and Tony failed to make so much as even a brief appearance. And then again after Katie and the woods, when she was drowning in fear and all he’d had to offer her was one phone call with furious, ugly words in place of comfort.

Effy can’t leave herself open for that kind of hurt again, that feeling of utter abandonment; she knows for sure she wouldn’t survive it a second time. And besides she has Freddie now. Loyal Freddie, who loved her even when she was busy ignoring him and fucking his best friend. Effy knows she has a lot to make up for (hitting a girl over the head, leaving her bleeding and unconscious in the woods and leading on a lost, desperate boy only to abandon him when he needed her most are only a small selection of the mistakes she has to atone for) and not fucking her big brother seems the least she can do. If it hurts her not to be with him, if she finds it hard, then all the better. Nobody said penance was easy.

\---

Freddie seems to notice the awkwardness, the tension she’s trying very hard to hide.

‘You want a drink babe?’ he shouts over the music and barely waits for her nod before he’s slipping over to the bar, eager for the excuse to leave.

‘Babe?’ Tony mouths, eyebrow raised in humour and she tries desperately not to respond to the smile playing at the corner of his lips, shrugs lightly instead.

‘How long you back for?’ she mouths back, working hard at appearing nonchalant as he takes a step closer, eyes fixed on hers.

It’s his turn to shrug and her anger at his vagueness battles with the satisfaction that even now, in the dark of the club, music blaring, he can still understand her.

They stay like that for a minute, Tony staring and Effy unable to look away and she’s opening her mouth against her better judgement, about to say something stupid and unforgivable like ‘I’m glad you’re back’ or worse ‘Did you miss me?’. The words are right there on the tip of her tongue and she’s rising to her tiptoes, about to lean closer, mouth to his ear when suddenly he’s breaking the gaze and turning away.

It looks for a moment like he’s leaving and panic rises up in her chest before she realises he’s not going anywhere, has just turned towards Freddie’s sister Karen who looks up at him, her eyes ridiculously wide and fluttery . It’s such a transparent attempt at charm Effy waits for Tony to look back at her, to share the amused eye roll they‘ve been using since Effy was seven but it never comes. Tony’s eyes don’t so much as flicker in Effy’s direction.

Hurt wells up and she tries to swallow down the lump thick in her throat as Tony continues to ignore her in favour of leaning closer to Karen. He’s shouting something into Karen’s ear and she's leaning towards him in return, pressing their bodies together in one long line.

Karen answers him with lips millimeters from his ear and he throws his head back, laughs. Effy’s being dating Freddie for almost six months now, has spent a considerable amount of time in Karen’s presence and has yet to hear her say anything remotely amusing. There’s a bitter taste in Effy’s mouth.

\---

Six minutes later Freddie has returned with drinks and Tony is still talking to Karen.

\---

Tony barely looks at her for the rest of the night. All his attention, all his conversation, is for Karen alone.

Effy doesn’t understand and that feels new.

This is Tony after all. Tony, who she knows better than anyone, who rarely surprises her for the simple fact that she understands him better than she understands herself, can predict his actions better than she could ever predict her own.

Maybe a year spent under separate roofs, in separate cities has changed that.

\---

She can recall with complete clarity the last time they’d slept together before Tony had left for Cardiff. He’d been rough with her, pushing her back onto the bed and crushing their mouths together so violently she would have been frightened if it had been anyone but him. He’d pushed both her hands above her head as he fucked her, held them tightly so that she wouldn’t notice how badly his own were shaking.

She remembers that the curtains were still open when afterwards they’d lain side by side and he’d told her ‘This is your room now’ and how she’d gotten up to close them so he wouldn’t see her tears.

She’d said ‘I won’t miss you’ and remembers how he’d seemed amused by her lie, how he’d laughed at her until the fear rouse up to choke them both into silence, and how they hadn’t said anything else to each other after that, not even goodbye.

Effy thinks of Tony’s kisses, the sweetness in them that he’d never been able to hide and wonders what else has changed.


	3. Anthea

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I realise this chapter’s a bit of a sidetrack from the plot but I'd wanted to write something from Anthea’s point of view for ages, so here it is.

* * *

 

Her son finally comes home at nine thirty on a miserable Friday night in December.

The reunion isn’t quite what she’d imagined.

\---

Anthea hears the key in the lock and thinks for one wild moment, heart in mouth, that it must be Jim because Effy left with Freddie an hour ago and she can’t think of anyone else who has a key.

It doesn’t even occur to her that it might be Tony, the prodigal son returning at last, until she hears his voice call out "Hi mum" and catches a brief flash of dark brown hair as he leaps up the stairs, two at a time.

There’s the sound of him moving around, the brief hum of a tap turned on and off again and then he’s back down the stairs, fresh shirt halfway over his head and out the door before she even has time to return the hello. Before she has time to stop him in his tracks and demand to know where the hell he was all summer, why she hasn’t had more than a phone call from him in over eight months.

There are empty vodka bottles on the kitchen table, unopened letters strewn across the hall floor. The washing up hasn’t been done in weeks.

Anthea knows she should be embarrassed, that the house doesn’t exactly scream happy, independent woman but she can’t seem to locate the energy. Just feels tired instead.

All the curtains in the house are closed.

\---

There’s a half empty bottle of pain meds with her son’s name on the label, hidden in her beside drawer. She roots it out, washes down two small white pills with the last mouthful of the Chardonnay she’d opened an hour ago and then recoils from her bedroom.

She hates the room now, looks at it and can only see the empty spaces where her husband’s things used to be. All her mistakes laid out bare.

She retreats to her daughter’s room and tells herself she's not hiding.

Effy’s bed is unmade, the sheets probably haven’t been washed in weeks, but it’s soft when Anthea lies back and she wants to stay there forever, warm and surrounded by the familiar scent of her daughter.

It’s the closest she gets these days to not feeling alone.

\---

The pills are beginning to work; her mind starting to blur at the edges. Her thoughts feels sluggish and sticky, like they're moving through treacle. The clock in the hall ticks too loudly, annoyingly. She wants to put a pillow over her head, scream, anything to drown out the noise.

This is the only room in the house with the curtains left open. Tony’s bag and laptop lie abandoned in the far corner, illuminated orange in the street light. Anthea thinks he must have changed in here, that maybe he’d forgotten that this wasn’t his room anymore. Forgotten that he’d given it away.

She wonders if they’ll fight over it later, her children. When they’re drunk and tired and both unwilling to be relegated to the single bed. It seems unlikely.

Perhaps they’ll both just sleep in here. It’s not like they haven’t done it before.

\---

For months after the accident, when Tony was still learning to be himself again, she would wake up to hear him calling out in the middle of the night.

Anthea’s not delusional for all her flaws, has long since accepted she won’t be winning any prizes for world’s greatest mother, but in times like that, with her little boy sounding so lost and afraid, she would have done anything to get to him. Would have killed if she’d had to.

Only he wasn’t calling for her.

Tony, more terrified and frantic then she’d ever heard him, only ever called for Effy.

\---

She’d never been able to get back to sleep on those kinds of nights, had lain awake listening to her husband’s snores, waiting until enough time had passed for her to go and check on her children without being seen. Anxious, for some reason she could never really explain, not to be caught.

She always found them the same way. Both asleep; Tony turned towards his sister, hair dark against the white pillow and Effy, propped up against the headboard as if she’d fallen asleep quietly reading the book of Greek mythology still lying open on her lap.

\---

This is the way it’s always been; Tony and Effy, two halves of some greater sibling whole. A beautiful, indivisible clique of two that has no room for parents who could never understand what it is to be something brilliant and dark and strange.

\---

Little was ever required of Anthea at school events. By the time Tony turned eight she'd learned her role well; sitting quietly at parents evenings, nodding attentively with every positive comment, every fresh compliment, smile fixed in place. It was almost depressingly predictable.

When Tony was fifteen, desperate to break the monotony and to show she did actually have some form of input into her son's life however small, Anthea had asked his history teacher what he thought Tony should be thinking of as a career. The man had looked at her like she something alien, something to be pitied in its stupidity, And then the corners of his mouth had turned up and he’d leaned forward, voice low like he was telling her a secret and whispered "Anything he wants". She’d not been able to sleep that night.

She looks at her daughter sometimes, when Effy’s sleeping or fresh from the shower. Quick glances meant only as checks, but then she finds she can’t stop looking, can’t breathe with how beautiful she is. How beautiful and how distant.

Anthea has never been beautiful. She has never been clever. She has never shone brightly enough to have all the infinite possibilities of the world laid out before her like promises.

Sometimes she wonders how her children ever came from her at all.

\---

When everything had fallen apart so spectacularly, a private disaster of Chernobyl proportions, she had been so sure Tony would come home.

Not to comfort her she knew (this was all her fault anyway and the guilt still wouldn’t shift, not with all the alcohol and drugs and denial she could handle) but because Effy needed him.

If there was one truth their family lived by, one knowledge so unshakable that drug overdoses and car crashes and affairs couldn’t loosen it, it was that Tony would always be there if his sister needed him.

It shocked her more than the breakup of her marriage to realise that too was a lie.


	4. Tony

Tony keeps waiting for her to figure it out. To catch on to this twisted little game he’s created and, as always, to play along.

His sister’s pretty smart after all.

“The cleverest person I know” he’d told Sid once and that hasn’t changed. She should have figured this warped little thing out the minute he’d turned away from her in that dingy club. Should have realised in those first few moments they were alone together and he didn’t lean in to kiss her (didn’t try to touch her at all) or in the time he’d let Karen spend twenty consecutive minutes recounting her near miss at stardom on ‘Search for a Sexx Bomb’ without once saying anything even remotely mocking. Or in the thousand other moments that they’d been together since he’d got back.

But there’s something wrong between them now. Some shift of balance that’s left them adrift from one another, out of their dept and drowning. Effy never touches him anymore. Never smiles that shrewd, appealing little smile, all sideways lips and no sign of teeth.

Tony knows she’s angry, can’t blame her for that. Their mum and dad, Katie; everything turning to shit before her eyes and he wasn’t there, couldn’t even stretch to the train fare home when she so obviously, desperately needed him.

It wasn’t really like that of course, but Tony doesn’t think he has the words to explain anymore.

\---

On Boxing Day 2004 an earthquake occurred under the seabed of the Indian Ocean. It caused a wall of water to rise up and slam into the coast of south east Asia at incredible speed. Everything was ruined, swept away by the force of such sheer, limitless destruction.

For Tony the accident had felt like that. Total destruction so utterly, unflinchingly complete and the tattered remains of his life (everything he’d ever had or could imagine wanting) lying in ruins, scattered around him like driftwood.

\---

He’d not given up. Tony wasn’t the type. He’d gotten down on his hands and knees and crawled, had picked through the wreckage of his stupid, broken, fucked up life and rebuilt it piece by piece, until he could walk and talk and write again. Until he could remember where he lived and could stand to be in crowds and could feel the blood rush to his groin, hard-on pressed tight against the fly of his jeans.

He’d gotten back every last thing he lost. Put his life back together, complete with loyal best friend and a sweet, sexy, besoted girlfriend. Only to find it wasn’t enough.

He doesn’t think he could describe how good it felt to be at university, fresh start laid out so temptingly, like the crisp white of a blank piece of paper.

New city, new people; it was like a drug. A chance to be himself again and no-one around to remember what he looked like stretched out on a hospital bed with a tube down his throat or with drool on his face from slurring his words or with neat little squares of chicken laid out on his plate, carefully cut up by his mum so he might have a chance at feeding himself.

Bristol is still home but since the accident home for Tony means walking aids and pain killers and shitty electric toilet seats. It means lying best mates and friends that look at you with pity in their eyes. It means cheating girlfriends and hiding under beds and nipples like crème caramels that you can’t remember, let alone get hard about.

Bristol is home but Cardiff is freedom and Tony hadn’t come back for the simple reason that he hadn’t wanted to give that up.

\---

Tony thinks he would have come home if Effy had asked but that’s the thing about his sister; the more she wants something, the harder she works to pretend she doesn’t.

So Effy didn’t ask and he didn’t come. And now there’s this distance between them, this barrier, like his sister spent all the time he was away building walls around herself, higher and stronger every day and now nothing he says, nothing he does, is enough to bring them down.

For the first time he sees Effy as others see her; unfathomable and remote and as untouchable as air. It terrifies him.

\---

Things go on this way for two weeks, and it feels like forever.

Christmas day comes and goes and Tony can feel Effy’s distance from him even as they sit side by side on the couch, their mother at the tree handing out presents, smiles and false cheer doing nothing to disguise the half empty bottle of gin in her hand. Nothing to hide the emptiness of the chair where their father used to sit.

Last year they’d fucked on the exact same couch, long and slow and sweet, tinsel glittering in Effy’s hair as their parents, happily oblivious, lay sleeping upstairs. This year their elbows barely touch.

\---

Maybe things would have gone on this way indefinitely. But Tony’s not the type to give up and once again he finds himself crawling on his hands and knees, trying desperately to rebuild piece by piece something he’s terrified he’s lost for good.

\---

He is very glad of Karen. She’s his way in.

If Effy had her way Tony thinks she’d spend her all of her time at Freddie’s, safe and hidden where he couldn’t get to her. Where he couldn’t push against all those carefully constructed walls she’d so meticulously put up.

But as Karen’s boyfriend Tony has run of the Mclair’s house. He gets to sit in the living room with them, gets to eat family meals. It’s a doorway into their lives together, one he’d sought the moment he’d heard Effy say those three hateful words, sounding so distant, so untouchable on the far end of a phone.

Freddie and Effy as a couple and Tony watches carefully, can’t seem to look away. He sees every smile, every touch, burns with the jealousy of it. He wants to scream, wants to throw things, wants to punch Freddie in his smug good looking face.

But for all the sweetness and smiles, all the lingering, intense looks Tony watches them and realises he's never once seen Freddie make his sister laugh.

It makes him think perhaps everything’s not as hopeless as it seems.

\---

The breakthrough when it comes is sudden and incredible and radiant and goes unnoticed by almost everyone else.

\---

Tony doesn’t know what compels him to reach out after so long without touching.

Perhaps it’s the close proximity of his sister next to him at the table, the familiar warmth and smell of her calling to him after so long. Perhaps it’s watching Karen and Freddie bicker, their pathetic attempts to embarrass each other so petty in the light of everything he feels for Effy. However bad things get between them Tony knows with absolute certainty they’ll never end up like Karen and Freddie. He promises himself that.

Whatever the reason, one moment he’s sitting patiently at the Mclair’s kitchen table, half listening to Karen and Freddie bickering opposite him and the next he’s reaching out towards the warm presence of Effy on his left, moving ever so gradually until he finds her thigh. And then he’s curling his fingers inwards, not moving further, just letting them rest high up against the inside of her leg.

He keeps his eyes on his plate. Her skin is ridiculously hot.

Tony slides his eyes to Karen’s father, sitting on his right at the head of the table, leaning back with his arms spread wide on the table, like Jim used to before he fucked off and left.

But Tony needn’t have worried. Karen and Freddie’s argument is an old one it seems, their mother’s name cropping up again and again and it makes their father frown, makes him tense, his whole attention focused on his children’s fury.

Tony and Effy might as well be alone.

Gently Tony pushes his fingers further between her legs and slowly drags them up higher. Effy doesn’t look up from her plate, doesn’t blush but her fingers are white around her fork and in a motion unnoticeable to anyone around the table she lets her legs drop open.

It’s all the agreement he needs.

Tony’s fingers are there immediately, curling under the cotton of her underwear. It’s awkward at this angle but they’ve played this game before, secret touches under kitchen tables as they’re parents sat blissfully unaware and it doesn’t take long before he’s got his hand where he wants it, two long fingers moving slowly inside her, thumb flicking repeatedly against her clit.

She’s so wet.

He’s not had a hand on his sister in months and he’s suddenly desperate for it, for the feel of her hot and tight around his fingers, for the taste of her on his tongue.

Freddie’s calling Karen a bitch but Tony can’t focus enough to work out why. He concentrates on moving the food around his plate, fork loose in his right hand. He’s never been less hungry for food, too far gone to eat but he stabs a piece of carrot anyway, for show. He moves the thumb of his left hand faster.

There’s a slight hitch in Effy’s breathing then, slight but noticeable and Tony knows he should stop. But she’s so wet for him and it’s been so long.

His cock is tight against his jeans, a low insistent throb. If Karen and Freddie stopped arguing this second and turned the full weight of their attention onto Tony, he doesn’t think he could stop.

Effy comes silently, her body clenching tight around his fingers in spasms and he withdraws his hand slowly, fights the urge to raise his fingers to his mouth and curls them into a fist instead.

There’s a pink tinge to Effy’s cheekbones but it doesn’t last long, skin already fading to pale when finally Freddie takes a deep breath in, rolls his eyes one final time and falls silent. Karen looks across the table at Tony and smiles, triumphant. She thinks she’s won.

Tony imagines the sound of walls crumbling around him and smiles back.


	5. Karen

It’s raining. Feet hurting in the new black stilettos (that were supposed to make her beautiful, make her sexy, make her different) Karen slips them off, the cold pavement a small kind of relief from the burning in her heels. A waste of forty quid but she’s wasted more money on less.

It’s teetering on the edge of morning, light waiting frustrated behind heavy clouds but Karen’s glad of the darkness. Embarrassing enough that she has to walk past random strangers in this state she doesn’t need to parade past them in the full light of day. She keeps her head down, wipes angrily at the tears streaking down her face, a betrayal she can't hide.

The wind starts to ease up by the time she leaves the noise of the city centre behind her, rain falling vertically instead of sideways. Freddie will probably be in bed by now but that’s ok. She wouldn’t know what to tell him anyway.

_The bathroom's dirty, damp. There's graffiti on the off-white counter. The cleanest things in there are the crisp white lines of coke lined up so neatly by the sharp edge of Tony’s debit card. Effy’s black hair falls like a curtain across her face as she leans forwards, back curled gracefully, to inhale them._

Karen walks, tries hard to stop crying, repeatedly wipes her hand hard across her cheeks to remove the mascara and mucus smeared there. ‘No use crying over spilt milk’ she thinks and then doesn’t know why. She thinks perhaps it was something her mum used to say but there’s no way to tell. Death doesn't leave much opportunity for clarifying unanswered questions. Suicide even less.

_Tony’s hands are against the bare white skin of Effy's neck, their long familiar fingers curled possessively as he holds her hair out the way._

Her phone rings once, the first time tonight. She stares at the name ‘Tony’ glowing bright and insistent in the dark. It's only taken him an hour and twenty minutes to realise she's gone. After a minute it stops ringing. She puts it back in her bag and keeps walking.

_Karen's face is pressed into the crack between the door and the frame, wood cool against her cheek. She reaches up to steady herself, presses her palm against the crinkled paper of the' Out of order- please use upstairs bathrooms' sign stuck lopsidedly to the outer surface of the door_.

It's lighter now, the first rays of morning finally seeping through and the view of the house as she rounds the corner of her street is warm, beautiful relief. She goes in quietly, eager not to wake anyone. The last things she wants right now is witnesses or questions. Shoes abandoned in the hallway she pads silently to the kitchen, only the muddy footprints staining the carpet left behind to betray her.

_His hands work quickly as he makes up two more lines, as confident in this as he is in everything else. His face is hidden for moment as he leans over the parallel white lines, breathing deep through one nostril and then he's upright again and Karen's lost because he's so beautiful like this, head tipped back, eyes closed, slight half smile playing at his lips as he enjoys that first seductive buzz. There's no way for Karen to get closer, not without being seen but she desperately wants to. She desperately wants to._

The clock on the cooker glows red, accusatory. 05: 48. She has a ritual for nights like these, when everyone else is asleep and it's not quite day and she's far too buzzed to sleep. Kettle on, kitchen door closed so as not to wake anyone up she retreats to Freddie’s shed, cup of tea burning some semblance of warmth into her hands. She likes to lie on the hideous ratty sofa, sagging and musty with age and sing songs to the ceiling until light's streaming in across the floor and she’s soft and lazy with sleep. Sometimes she might take some biscuits, or chocolate if there’s any lying around but usually not. Most nights she feels too fat. Stars can’t afford bingo wings and Karen’s determined to be a star. To be adored.

Tonight there’s no tea. Just the shed and the sofa and the same comforting old blanket that’s been there forever and she lies down, cover pulled up over her face and forces herself to take deep measured breaths that hitch only slightly on the inhale. She's drenched. The rain's soaked through her dress, through her underwear. She can feel it collected in the padding of her bra, oozing against her skin when she moves.

_Tony reaches out for his sister then, brings there foreheads together, the black of their hair mingling until it's impossible to tell where one starts and the other ends. It's the laughter more than the physical contact that causes the first sharp edge of fear to pool jagged and heavy in Karen's belly. Their laughter, each the mirror of the other's, erupting low and soft like a secret before trailing into silence. His hands are in her hair again, the strands coiled around his fingers as he brings her head back, tilts it upwards, to look her in the eyes. Karen knows then, without understanding, that something's very very wrong. The heavy base of the music is thrumming vibrations through the floor. Blue eyes meet blue and they aren't looking away._

Nausea unfolds low and sudden in Karen's belly and she sits up. There are photos on the wall in front of her, obscure in the darkness but that doesn't matter. Karen knows them all by heart, knows they're all the same. Freddie and his boys, the three musketeers. Karen can't imagine friends like that. No life long friends for her, she has a hard time keeping them. The same could be said for boyfriends, she thinks, or mothers.

The first funeral Karen went to was her mother's. It was like being celebrity for the day, all those people, all those eyes on her and it wasn't til weeks late when the funeral was long over and the last relative had hugged her goodbye and the last well-meaning neighbors had collected up their dishes of half eaten sympathy food and slipped quietly out that Karen finally understood she was alone.

She'd said she'd loved Karen and she'd left her anyway. What chance does that give anyone else.

_He kisses her then, leaning down until their lips are almost touching, pausing a second to share his sister's breath and then he's closing the distance, skin against skin and it's gone from gentle to desperate in a second, their mouths pressed together bruisingly, hungrily, breathing hard, bodies one solid fluid line against each other. Effy's hands are in his hair, fingers gripping tight, Tony's arms reaching under her arse, lifting her up to the counter, never breaking the kiss and he's standing between her legs now, a hand pressed at the base of her back pushing their groins together hard as they rut against each other, tempo growing, breath coming in harsh pants._

Karen turns and runs


	6. Freddie

He thinks it's a lie at first. A joke or some messed up little game of Karen's. Like the time she fucked Cook just because she could, just because she knew it would piss him off.

Effy and her brother...there's no way. It's too sick, twisted. Even Stonems have limits.

Effy stays over most nights now. He's getting used to the warmth of her in his bed, tantalising bare skin grounding as it is intoxicating and he'd do anything for this girl.

He imagines he could draw every inch of her with his eyes closed; collarbones as sharp as weapons, blue veins twisting and delicate under her skin. A map of the world. These are the things that he believes, these are the things that are real.

Effy is everywhere, in everything. He's head is full of her, there's no room for Karen's lies.

He tells his sister to fuck off and tries to put the thought out of his mind.

\---

The bracelet’s cool against his skin. He twirls it around his fingers, remembering the delicate curve of Effy's wrist as she slipped it off, the careless way she dropped to his bedroom floor with the rest of her clothing. The promise in her smile tonight.

Lost in the memory of her body he doesn't notice his sister as he opens the shed door, gets as far as the old sofa before he spots the black outline of a body in the dark. For someone reason his first thought is Cook but then the shadow solidifies and its only Karen, sitting on the floor with her back to the wall. An empty bottle of wine lies abandoned against the leg of the sofa, its half full companion gripped tightly in her hand.

He's closer now, notices the red swelling around her eyes.

"Have you been crying?"

Her laugh is like broken glass, Freddie wants to wince.

"I’m celebrating" she says raising the bottle above her head in a toast where it sways erratically.

"Celebrating what?"

There's that laugh again, like some private joke. Like she laughing at his expense. Only it doesn't sound so much cruel as desperate and there's something off, something making him nauseous.

It's almost morning, grey light seeping in at the edges. Karen's skin looks waxy. For the first time Freddie wonders if she's ill. They don't see much of each other anymore but he knows their Dad's worried she's not eating.

Her eyes move to his hand, to the glint of silver there. She laughs again. "I pity you, you dumb fuck".

And just like that Freddie's angry and it feels good, familiar. There's nothing wrong with Karen, she's not sick. She's just being her usual bitchy self, the pathetic manipulative girl who uses their dead mum to win competitions, who can't stand to see anyone else happy if she's not.

"Fuck you" he yells back too loudly, ready for a fight but she's not looking at him, not even really listening. The quiet little-girl snuffling of her crying sounds louder in the early morning silence. Freddie shifts on his feet, awkward, unsure before squatting down, his shoulder scrapping on brick as puts his arm round her.

"I'm sorry he left you" he says after a few minutes of silence because in the end he is. Freddie knows better than anyone what its like to have your heart cut out by a Stonem, how long the wound bleeds, how fatal it feels. He's still got Effy's bracelet wrapped in his hand. It cuts into the skin between his fingers.

Karen nods and wipes her eyes. "Let's get fucked up" she says and there's something a little manic in her eyes but Freddie will take a little mania over tears any day (he's been friends with Cook for years, he can handle crazy) so he smiles at her and obediently goes to fetch the vodka and the pills and the very last of his coke.

It's almost fun getting absolutely off his head with his sister. They don't talk about much, mostly about childhood squabbles far enough in the past to have lost their sting or about private jokes, stupid little things their dad has done, the strange people they met on family holidays. They don't mention their mum and they don't mention Tony. Freddie also doesn't talk about Effy but he's not sure why.

"Remember that time when we little and we drank about half a bottle of Dad's port?"

Freddie snorts at the memory, immediate and real. "It wasn't half a bottle."

"Either way it was too much for you. You puked on Dad's tan loafers." Karen's openly laughing now and there's no bitterness in it, no broken glass. It's easy to laugh along.

Karen's flat on her back on the floor, her hand held up above her making invisible shapes in the air as she talks and Freddie moves to join her.

"Trust you to remember the kind of shoes!"

"You always were a lightweight."

Freddie echos her easy wide grin. "Hypocrite" he teases "Look at you, you're totally fucked!"

Karen doesn't argue, just smiles and goes back to drawing patterns is the air. They fall silent and the minutes stretch out. Freddie concentrating through the fuzziness in his head, trying to think of something to say, trying to remember which topics are safe.

"I'm sorry too" she says suddenly and drops her hand. It's so serious, so different from the moment before. Freddie doesn't understand what she's talking about.

"You're sorry about what?" he asks, keeping his voice light, trying to hold on to the playfulness.

They're lying next to each other on the floor and Karen turns her face towards him. Freddie sees with surprise she's crying again.

"I'm sorry about Effy."

Something in his stomach turns to lead. Karen's hair is a halo of wild knots, her makeup smeared in dark circles around her eyes. It's been so long since she's let anyone see her when she's anything other than immaculate.

"What about Effy?" he asks and thinks whatever it is he doesn't want to know.

"They're fucking each other Freddie." Her voice is a whisper.

He can't breathe, can't speak. Too much alcohol, too many drugs, they're rising up to choke him. He feels sick, needs very badly to vomit.

She told him this bullshit once before and he didn't believe her but she looks like a corpse stretched out like that. Like a victim, grey skinned and gaunt. The makeup around her eyes could be mistaken for fresh bruises. She doesn't look like a liar.

The memory of her voice is in his head: _"I pity you you dumb fuck"..."I'm sorry too"._ Its too much, its all too much. He can't believe her, he won't. He scrambles to his feet, still mute, shaking his head in the only denial he can muster.

Karen's sitting up now. "Just open your eyes Freddie, for fuck's sake!" Her voice is almost pleading and he wants to tell her its pathetic, she's pathetic. He wants to tell her she's sick and messed up and he's not falling for any of these twisted fucking lies.

She's still calling to him as he stumbles outside but he doesn’t hear the rest. The sun is finally up, frost decorating the freshly cut lawn, pale gold in the sunrise. On his hands and knees Freddie vomits onto the grass, heaving his guts out in the early dawn.

_"Just open your eyes.'"_


	7. Effy

Freddie's quiet these days, sullen in a way he’s never been before. It makes her nervous.

He’s always been gentle with her, still is, but there’s something else to him now, a single-mindedness that goes beyond want. He fucks her like he wants to break her, wants to split her open and climb inside.

She comes face to face with Karen in the corridors. The girl looks wrecked, vicious. On the way to the bathroom, to the kitchen, to the shed. She always seems to be there, always lurking, her eyes as wide and blank as mirrors.

Tony wears safety in his easy smiles and kisses like they're already free. Effy wishes she could be so relaxed, wishes she could believe it too.

Some nights she dreams she’s with Cook again, wakes not knowing where she is. She remembers being cold and how it felt to sleep on bare ground. She remembers Cook with blood on his face, the distance she felt from him even as they fucked.

She thinks she should feel saved now, feel safe but she’s more frightened than she’s ever been. She wakes in the darkness and can't remember whose breath it is against her neck.

The holiday ticks on; Karen watching Effy, Effy watching Freddie. And Freddie not watching anything, just smoking and staring into space and fucking her like he’s searching for something.

This can’t last forever. Someone will notice, someone will guess.

The smell of her brother lingers on her skin.

She's living on a knife edge.

\---

New Year's Eve and they’re all there, her friends and Tony’s; two separate worlds that don’t quite fit, forced into their mother's small town house.

Afterwards Effy will think there’s a certain aptness to everything falling apart on New Year, a cruel kind of poetry that appeals to her nature but for now she's too busy dancing, too busy drinking. For the first time in a long time she doesn’t feel like she’s being watched.

It’s strange to see Sid again, still wearing his favourite woolen hat, but oddly nice. Strange to see Cook trying it on with Jal and Anwar still trying it on with anything that moves. Maxxie is just as sweet, Cassie just as mental.

Emily and Naomi have gone from screaming at each other to necking in the corner. Anwar is trying to take pictures.

Effy loves this, loves the chaos, loves the emptiness that comes from drugs and booze and music so loud it’s impossible to think.

Her brother is dancing with his arms around Michelle, their hips tight together and grinding shamelessly. He catches her eye over Michelle’s shoulder, throws her his serotonin smile. Ecstasy and cocaine pump through her in pulses and she grins back. Her mouth feels dry. In two days Tony will go back to University but for now she has him and Freddie and Pandora and there’s some deep part of her, small and childlike, stretching warm and content in her chest.

"Thirsty!!" Pandora screams into her ear and Effy smiles at her too, reaches out to push a stray lock of hair behind her friend's ear, interlocks their fingers.

There’s no vodka left but Effy roots out a bottle of her mum’s not so well-hidden gin in a kitchen cabinet. They pass the bottle between them for a while, leaning against the counter and Effy tips her head back, letting the alcohol do its work. No-one bothered to turn the lights on in the kitchen and it's pure black behind her eyelids.

"Why do pills make you so thirsty Eff? It’s like that time we crashed that retirement party and Cooky told me they were mints so I took three at once and my tongue felt like sandpaper and I drank all the punch and threw up in that vase. Remember that? You remember that Eff? When I threw up in that vase?"

Effy smiles again but doesn’t open her eyes, enjoying the comforting canine feel of Panda’s chatter without listening. "I remember."

There’s the press of hands at her hips and she moves to cover them with her own, still not opening her eyes even as she hears Panda jump up to leave. Freddie leans against her, presses her body to the counter, licks away the traces of alcohol.

"Hello" he whispers against her lips.

They stay like that for a long time, not saying much, just kissing unhurriedly and sharing the rest of the gin. There's a graze over his left cheekbone. "Fell off my skateboard" he explains and the sweet, sheepish way he looks at her makes her want to cry.

She loves this boy. She thought once that might be enough to make her honest, make her good. She can't see her brother from this angle but she knows he's out there, probably with his arms around Michelle or some other girl. Maybe doing shots with Sid.

She leans against her boyfriend in the dark, breathes in the familiar smell of him and knows with heart-breaking certainty that it isn't enough. She will never be worthy of this boy's love, of his trust. Too much coke has left her feeling strung out and nauseous.

The party goes on around them.

\---

There’s a couple she doesn’t recognise making out against the back wall of the house so Effy retreats to the far end of the garden instead, last of the gin still in hand, hunkering down against the back fence and trying to ignore the cold. She tells herself she's not hiding.

The wind’s picked up. It whistles through the trees, a long drawn out wailing. She’d tried to warn him. _"I’ll break your heart"_ she’d told him, how much clearer could she be.

Effy lights a cigarette, blowing the smoke out slowly so that it catches the wind, watching through slitted eyes as the shadow of her brother crosses the grass and crouches down next to her, a pale hand reaching out for her light.

The house looks foreign from this angle, like a stranger. Her brother’s body is a warm line pressed against her side and she doesn't shiver.

They smoke in silence, listening to the wind, to the party, to the pantomime groaning of the couple rutting against the wall and she tries not to think about how guilty she. Tries not think of about what it means to betray someone you love, how sorry you can be and how ruthless.

She knows, in this one thing, Tony doesn’t understand. He’d been frightened that Effy loving Freddie meant what was between them would have to stop, that everything might change. That's the whole reason he's here, the thing he came back to reminder her.

But Effy knows, has probably always known, that the thing to be afraid of is not that this will stop, but that it might never stop. Never go away. To belong to someone, for them to belong to you but to go on forever pretending, lying, never able to claim each other. Their own personal brand of stonem self-destruction.

There are lies you tell yourself because it's easier and lies you tell yourself to survive. If Freddie loved her, if she loved him- she'd thought maybe it would be enough. Maybe her and Tony weren't a sure thing, maybe they could be free from each other. Maybe they wouldn't have to spend the rest of their lives wanting something they couldn't have.

Freddie was the lie she told to keep herself sane, the one she can't stop telling.

She gets to her feet and Tony follows, reaching out and bringing her forehead to his in that familiar gesture of comfort. They haven't said a word to each other in all the time they've been sitting outside but Effy feels better, feels less afraid. There's a lot of noise from inside the house, people cheering the stroke of midnight. A new year, a fresh start and she's so scared nothing will change.

"I knew it."

Effy turns at the sound, barely recognising Freddie’s figure in the dark, knowing him by voice alone. The words are quiet and harsh, like they've been dragged out of his against his will. 'I pretended not to believe her but I knew it. All this time, right in front of me. Right in front of everyone!'

"Freddie mate" Tony says, aiming for normal "We don't under-"

"Are you fucking your brother?" Freddie cuts him off, voice a false kind of calm and Effy stands there stupidly, unable to answer, unable to even register the question.

He takes her silence as an admission. In books they talk about someone 'snapping' and Effy had never really got it but the thing that had been growing in Freddie for weeks, the thing that she had glimpsed in his silences and far away looks, that had been pulled tighter and tighter as she watched, seems to break open before her eyes and she doesn't have any other word to describe the pure misery on his face as he reaches and pulls her towards him.

"You bitch...you- You sick fucking bitch!"

Pain flares in her arms where he’s gripping them and then he’s pushing her back, his features distorted, almost sobbing. He looks so hurt, so angry. She wants to reach out, doesn't have the guts.

Tony steps between them and Effy will never know which of them Freddie had been aiming at but the punch connects squarely with her brother's nose. She’s close enough to hear the thud as Tony's head is whipped back.

He stumbles back a few paces but keeps his feet, making no move to avoid the next hit, or the one after that. If someone in the future called her brother heartless, selfish (as she found they were often inclined to do) Effy would recall this moment; her brother's arms held stubbornly at his sides, not trying to fight. Quietly taking the beating they both deserved.

Freddie follows him, strikes at him again and again. Tony hits the floor on the fourth blow, rolls instinctively into a ball and Freddie kicks him hard in the side. There’s a crunching of broken ribs and then lots of shouting and someone yelling Tony’s name and Sid and Maxxie are running from the house, coming for Freddie across the grass and then Cook’s there between them and it seems to Effy as if everyone’s fighting, everyone’s screaming.

She stands unmoving, a pale, lost creature in the center of a storm she never wanted but created anyway . Freddie detaches himself from the fight and moves towards her almost haltingly, as if drawn in against his will.

The fury’s gone from his features now. He look's wrecked, open.

"Please. Just tell me it’s not true."

Tony’s on the floor, bleeding from his nose and lip, left arm curled protectively around his ribs but it’s Freddie who looks broken.

"Please" he says again.

There’s nothing else to do. It’s a choice, except not really because there was only ever one way this could have ended. She can never have her brother and Freddie loves her, Freddie can save her. Effy thinks it must always have come to this.

"It’s not true" she lies. And Freddie’s nodding, still crying but nodding through his tears, saying over and over ‘Ok, ok then, ok’ as if trying to convince himself and he must know it for the lie it is but the denial is enough, enough for them to pretend, to go on as they are.

She’d never expected Tony to look so betrayed. He’s still lying on the floor, eyes wide, bleeding into his sleeve.

He never did understand. There’s only one way this could have ended.

She steps past the body of her brother and into the circle of Freddie’s arms. He’s shaking violently.

"It’s ok" she lies again "Everything’s going to be ok".


	8. Epilogue

_It would have been nice to be able to say they stopped._

_To be able to say that seeing the hurt they had caused, that someone else knowing, someone else saying the words out loud, had knocked them to their senses._

_Or perhaps to say they simply grew out of it._

_Different cities, different lives, it would have been easy to let it go._

_But for them it had never been about choice._

\---

In January Tony went back to university, bruises already healing. He came home every holiday like a dutiful son, tried to leave his sister in peace as much as he could stand. The fight was never mentioned but Tony felt Freddie's eyes on him whenever they were in the same room and did his best to stay away. He drank a lot, studied a lot, spent too much time with Michelle.

Exams had always been easy for him. He passed his finals without breaking a sweat and left Cardiff with a first class honors degree and a slight sense of loss. Only his mother came to his graduation. Effy was somewhere in Europe and then Asia, never staying still for long. His father had declined to attend.

There seemed nowhere to go but back home and Tony wasn't sure he would survive that but in the end London saved him; the perfect haven for a clever, arrogant boy, who could get lost in a city full of clever arrogant men.

To his mother's complete absence of surprise he fell into banking, found he was hungry for it. One of the few who hadn't been to private school, who had no connections, no-one expected him to last and he loved it for that. For being the underdog, being dismissed and overlooked and winning anyway.

Tony felt at home with the pace, the ruthlessness, the large sums of money. Completing on a deal felt a little like sex, like fucking a girl who'd once turned him down. A cold kind of triumph.

Occasionally he would get postcards from Effy; never more than one or two lines, never about how she was or what she was doing. Just abstract statements, a stray thought she'd decided to put down on paper and send to him. Something always tugged in him at the sight of her handwriting.

He didn't sleep well.

There were visits of course. Neither of them could stay away forever and how much easier it was to play this game in the anonymity of a big city, no-one to watch them, nobody to care who or what they were to each other.

He would pick her up from the airport, waiting like a nervous teenager, tachycardic and dry mouthed at the arrivals gate. And then he would catch sight of her, looking just the same and something in him would quieten as it always did and he would be able to smile his trademark lazy smile and calmly open his arms to her.

When she was there the rest of his life felt surreal, something stupid he'd dreamed up as he'd been sleeping. It was impossible to recall the triumph of a deal done, the appeal of extra zeros in his account.

They would spend the time fucking and going to dingy east-London clubs that he wouldn't have been seen dead in in his real life. She still liked trance music, still liked to dance with her eyes shut. Men's eyes still tracked her as they walked down the street.

It never lasted long, there was always somewhere else she was going, somewhere else for her to be. He'd try to give her money, the only thing he had left to offer, but she would just laugh and turn him down and leave him feeling stupid and empty, as if it was her that had been the dream after all.

\---

In the end Freddie had been the one to finish it. There's wasn't much room to argue. ''Can't stand being this close and yet not really having you" he'd said and that had been that.

Effy had been surprised at how hurt she'd felt. But they're were both leaving for university and time and distance had softened the blow.

She'd picked Edinburgh because it was far away and she liked the cold but she found it hard to settle, begun to feel restless, claustrophobic in her own skin.

Languages had never been a challenge and flights to Germany were going cheap. She arrived in Berlin to deep snow and stayed until summer. France after that, then Spain and Italy and Singapore, courtesy of a very rich, very lonely business man.

Sometimes she traveled alone, sometimes with others. Well-off students on their gap year would pick her up like a stray, fund her train or plane ticket, enamoured with her beauty and with the idea of her, loving the bohemian air she gave their trip, the good story she would make when telling their friends back home.

She lived with a street-cleaner in Paris, a group of Italian actors in Moscow. Work was easy if you weren't fussy and she lived cheaply, saving her money for the flights to London when missing her brother became too much.

She sent him post-cards now and then, found she had nothing to say, only wanted to ask him questions and nothing else. In the end she would write odd statements instead, little facts about the city or country she was in, her opinion of the food, the current weather conditions. It was easier that way.

When she visited him he looked slicker; designer haircut, clothes perfectly tailored but he smelled the same under his expensive cologne and he kissed her without urgency, as if they'd never been apart. Staying with him was like an extract from someone else's life, how things could have been if they didn't already belong to each other as siblings and she stayed with him for a long as she could stand, leaving before she was tempted to stay for good.

Each time she swore to herself she wouldn't come back. Never managed to keep to her promise for more than a year.

\---

_No for them there was no stopping. No ending._

_Freddie had known that even as he had chosen to believe the lie._

_It was a sure thing after all._

\---

 

**The End**


End file.
